Connecting the Good: Using the Internet to Serve the “Outernet” Chapter 11, Part 5
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
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You are in Chapter 11, Part 5, Connecting the Good: Using the Internet to Serve the “Outernet” — OneSphera in Action – Putting It All Together… The Future of OneSphera
Chapter 11 posts:
Building a “Super-Highway of Love”… One Sphera is Born … The Currency of One Sphera: TRUST
OneSphera in Action – Putting It All Together… The Future of OneSphera
Are you trying to figure out where this is All Going? Read Building Bridges to a New World — embodying the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.
Voice-overs are now at the top of my posts for anyone who doesn’t have the time to sit and read! Also, find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on Spotify and Apple!
REMINDER of the READER SURVEY
Previously from Chapter 11, Part 4
Unlike siloed networks that organize around a specific idea, philosophy, or project, OneSphera is not a “thing.” It is not separate from anything but rather a network for everything—everything that is true and good in a community. Like your smartphone's mapping function, it’s transparent and invisible, working behind the scenes to help you get where you want to go.
OneSphera is not a compartmentalized technology like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, but rather a living, interactive “whole life” platform that addresses individual passions and community needs and integrates the head, heart, and hands of any community. It empowers the community to “play together” for mutual benefit and crowdsources the collective community sense and wisdom to operationalize Love.
You may recall a term I have used, “collective or co-intelligence,” to describe how communities developed shared principles, virtues, and needs. I have already described the example in Chapter 8 of how we did that at the Valentine’s Day meeting in 2006.
OneSphera is an example of what has recently been called “Collective Augmented Intelligence.” That means that technology can augment or increase a person’s and even a whole community’s capacity to function as a superorganism with superintelligence and a supermind!
OneSphera in Action – Putting It All Together
As a closet techie and “nerd,” I was thrilled to be able to use this new technology to emulate Beloved Community, with Symbiotic Culture DNA infused at every level. After all, if we are going to turn the financial and political power structure on its head, it will require a “bottom-up” social technology rather than the top-down one that has developed over the past two decades.
OneSphera was my attempt to reproduce what I already understood about creating a Beloved Community. As I suggested earlier in the chapter, a unique feature of OneSphera involves the specific pathways we identified to accelerate the connection between passions and interests on the one hand and individual and community needs and roles on the other.
So, in this section, I want to dive deeper into how OneSphera engages the community as it already is – radically including all segments seeking to connect and extend the good – and how the “inner engineering” accelerates connection, cooperation, collaboration, and coordination to help us build a Network Commons.
In our brochure, we described “a dynamic multi-layered reward system, a loyalty program that actually works …all in a constellation of shared interests, needs and offers, and collaborative projects …We support our interactive, engaged community members and incentivize them to share their truthful opinions, ratings, and more. Members can find and engage with other like-minded people and organizations, earn rewards, and co-create a thriving, interactive local community and economic ecosystem.”
Our multidimensional approach extended the exchange of goods, services, and information to include a community's entire cultural landscape.
These were not hyperbolic sales claims. We had designed a digital system that would deliver the goods. So, let’s have a peek “under the hood.”
The first thing to remember about OneSphera is that it “co-evolves” with a trusted IRL (in real life) network. It guarantees sovereignty and transparency in a field of coherence. As we said earlier in this chapter, the individual user is in control of what they see and what is revealed about them.
To explore OneSphera more in-depth, let’s begin with its core feature and “engine” LET’S CONNECT! that puts the individual user front and center.
In our prospectus, we wrote that this feature's purpose is “Connecting you to your centers of passion (spheres of interest and influence), helping you connect with others in your community who share the same passions—to make friends, play, connect with your neighbors, do business, volunteer, practice mutual aid, find capital, collaborate on projects, build Symbiotic Networks, and much more.”
Notice how far-reaching and all-encompassing those kinds of connections are.
They extend to every aspect of community life, emulating your smartphone to create a “smart community” – a mycelial network nourishing all involved.
OneSphera’s revolutionary approach automates and accelerates third-party and other direct connections and can also be used to connect with groups, organizations, businesses, and local government departments you want to support or engage with. It helps make one-to-one and one-to-many connections while alerting users to “Affinity People” (those who share the same common interests and other connections) in their immediate community — so purposeful connections can happen in ways never before possible.
Even though the main focus is building a local community, OneSphera can be used globally. Imagine being able to identify and connect with like-minded/hearted people wherever you are—and connect with others while traveling, at airports, conferences, events, and in your networks.
The next feature, LET’S TALK!, allows connected and approved members to communicate with one another through various channels, including messaging, text, email, and phone.
Through LET’S MEET! users access a robust event calendar to organize their personal and professional time, again around passions, interests, and needs. This single interface connects them with virtual and in-person events and one-to-one meetings.
LET’S SHARE! (NEEDS AND OFFERS) allows people to find and share resources inside their local community. Buy, Sell, Barter, and Donate options expand and aggregate the avenues for exchanging value. You or an organization would post offers and needs, including seeking volunteers, opportunities for mutual aid, and buying and selling.
Here's a simple example.
Imagine you have fruit trees, have already harvested all you can use, and want to reach out to all of the people in the local community who do gleaning. You would then post this to the public feed, and another user would click on the button “I am Interested,” and then you are connected. Even if someone wasn’t interested or couldn’t do it themselves, they could click the button, “I Can Connect You to Another” who they think might help. Another way trusted third-party connections can be accelerated!
Needs and Offers occur within a more profound and broader Symbiotic Culture context centered on the twelve community need areas and building Symbiotic Networks.
That’s why it is more than a one-on-one “one-off” because these smaller and largely invisible exchanges are part of a bigger vision and context of mutually building a resilient community-based economy.
OneSphera also serves the needs of those creating projects and larger Symbiotic Networks through its LET’S WORK! function where you can find and offer jobs and resources and create and manage projects to improve your life, organizations, and communities. (For an example of how this feature can support a community-wide project, we will discuss below the plan we designed for the annual Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful campaign.)
In addition to LET’S WORK supporting the essential aspects of the Project, such as creating a Team and establishing goals, it provides an easily accessible source of information. It works in concert with other OneSphera functions.
For example, the Needs and Offers tool can request manpower and resources from the Community and even connect with local government. The Events tool sets up meetings for the Team and advertising activities like the main Clean-up Event. The personalized Newsfeed will keep users current on the various Projects, Events, Needs & Offers, and Organizations users want to follow.
After the Project is complete, we have the Users rate the Project and the various participants on a scale of 1-5. This feedback mechanism helps build the reputation of the Team Members, the Sponsors, and the participants.
Next, we have PROJECTS, where connections become more purposeful. As you can see from the graphic, these individuals are connecting around creating a local food network. Any individual or group of individuals can connect with any PROJECT, each of which is a “fractal” of Symbiotic Culture DNA — i.e., it has a transcendent purpose for mutual benefit, resonates with our 12 shared values, is dedicated to practicing the Virtues that enable collaboration, has identified specific community needs, and is addressing those needs.
Our two years of work identifying specific phrases and interests made it easier for individuals to match themselves with projects and roles. If you’ve ever found yourself – or a team member – stuck in the wrong role, you know how that can slow, if not stop, progress. On the other hand, individuals in the right role for them tend to be effective – and happy.
Can you see how this precision increased the number of helpful connections and enhanced their quality as well?
Can you see how this is different from simply creating a network of like-minded individuals and hoping they will connect meaningfully to create meaningful results?
As a concrete example, have a look at our “map” for a real-world community project, the annual Truckee River Clean-Up. In this “Bringing It All Together” graphic, you can see where every one of the features – PROJECTS, NEEDS AND OFFERS, EVENTS, and NEWS -- comes into play. Any individual with the OneSphera app could, based on their interests and passions, plug into any aspect of the project they resonated with – with just one click. They could volunteer a specific skill – or show up for the clean-up.
Whatever their passion or “work of heart” is – writing news stories, designing a poster, coordinating volunteers, handling logistical details – there are ways for anyone to participate at whatever level they choose.
To be clear, OneSphera wasn’t operative during this campaign, but we planned a complete support campaign, including using the blockchain-based Value Chain Platform to “gamify” participation and reward those who chose to become involved. Our plan included a “time-sensed campaign” where new bonuses and benefits would roll out at each stage, creating a snowball of support and momentum. Imagine how much more cost-effective it would be to incentivize citizens to spread the word and get involved to augment traditional advertising.
The clean-up project is the perfect example of a community endeavor in which anyone can participate, and everyone will benefit. It shifts focus away from political and religious division and individual business interests and involves everyone in beneficial, proactive work.
As an aside, I’ve become more aware of how many of our political and spiritual disagreements are about high-level global ideas that cannot be resolved while we ignore our local communities—ground zero for reality!
OneSphera is focused on the functionality of real-world needs.
The conscious and deliberate connections made individual-to-individual, individual-to-group, group-to-group, and network-to-network are like the mycelial network that nourishes a forest.
Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of exchanges all support the greater good that creates a vital and thriving community.
Our OneSphera vision didn’t stop there.
We imagined a Cosmo-local network that would scale and spread organically, with every human in the world having access to this “free” cloud, visualized as the cloud of resources radiating outward from each person, from the level of the street, neighborhood, community, region, nation, and globally – all built on the coherent foundation of Divine Love and mutual benefit.
As a fractal of trusted third-party connections, this would be a genuinely trusted network – designed to serve participants rather than digitally enslave us.
Now that I have drilled down on OneSphera, I want to zoom in on the bigger picture and larger purpose of such a platform. It’s not just a platform to accelerate local connections but to build a whole-cloth network of love and service—an evolving Superhighway.
In these times of widening division over politics, religion, identity, and other ideas and concepts, OneSphera, based on Symbiotic Culture, can bring an entire community
“down to earth.”
It breaks the trance—and the grip—of the Culture of Separation by building trust and working together across boundaries to address real-world needs and practical concerns. All the features are about building bridges that become the “interstitial tissue,” connecting diverse groups that might otherwise compete.
The Future of OneSphera
So …you may be asking …what happened to OneSphera? Did it get built, and if not, why not? We built the software architecture and beta-tested features, such as LET’S CONNECT. And while we were well-prepared for takeoff, we never entirely left the runway.
A sudden accident stopped us in our tracks.
My friend and business partner had a terrible accident on the major Highway 80 in 2018 while returning from Sacramento to his home in Reno. His car skidded, flipped over, and burst into flames, and he ended up in the hospital with a significant brain injury. It took him almost three years to recover, and OneSphera never did. When he was well enough to pick up where we left off, I was already occupied with another business venture.
Then, shortly after, as I will share in Chapter 12, I had my own near-death experience.
Another primary reason OneSphera hasn’t been built is that we never got the funding required, and in retrospect, I see that is not too surprising. The first and most significant challenge was that the idea was too huge and made up of what could have been ten separate applications.
While the entire platform had a plan to “monetize,” that wasn’t our primary purpose—it was designed to empower local communities and “bottom-up” projects, in contrast to the desires of the “vulture capitalists” who look only for financial gain and look past the other forms of wealth to enrich a community.
This may sound crazy or like “sour grapes,” but I am grateful we didn’t get funded then. With all due respect to the generous and foresighted individuals who supported our first phase, I see in retrospect that despite our vision and intention, we hadn’t yet developed the inner qualities to hold to our vision and keep us on track – in the face of “real” money.
Let’s imagine some venture capital consortium gave us the investment capital to launch, and we did. My team, our early investors, and I would be wealthy, worth hundreds of millions. Maybe OneSphera would have been bought by some more prominent, less mission-driven entity that would have turned it into just another profit-generating competing silo instead of a community resource for the benefit of all.
It would not have been built on Symbiotic Culture DNA or bound to the Transcendent—our understanding of their foundational importance had not yet developed.
It might have ended up being a helpful tool, but it would not have inspired people to
create a new way of life.
The timing was wrong then, and by that, I mean I needed to learn and realize more, and we as a society needed to get closer to that “hit bottom” point that finally sparks the willingness to choose “recovery.”
As you will discover in the next chapter, I needed to go through my own crisis that deepened my spiritual awareness, to become clearer about the Culture of Separation, and to identify the Ancient Blueprint that must be at the foundation of and reverberate throughout a technology platform like this one.
Over the past five years—even more so over the past two years—I’ve had to identify and cultivate the interior qualities required to hold space for such an endeavor. It has required reflection …discomfort … and a deep understanding that I didn’t have ten or even five years ago.
The good news is that the software architecture is in place to launch OneSphera as a Cosmo-local digital platform to “weave a web of mass construction” locally and spread and
scale globally.
It can happen because of our unshakeable commitment to using the Symbiotic Culture DNA to bring about “fractal community empowerment.” There is also a “ripening” of our collective understanding that the Culture of Separation cannot get us through the confluence of crises we now face, as the Culture of Connection is moving closer to being “an idea whose time has come.”
It's not hard to imagine that there are wealthy individuals and organizations — with sufficient resources – who recognize what a true gift to humanity such a new technological infrastructure would be!
Imagine OneSphera (or something like it) as a worldwide “public utility” — a gift to humanity and a living legacy – a new Internet layer.
Imagine …a thriving decentralized economy built on mutual aid and a more democratic political order as a “collateral benefit” of this local re-empowerment. Imagine the right use of technology as a bottom-up tool instead of a top-down imposition, where digital sovereignty and selfless service prevail, and the good gets multiplied for all.
Call it conscious evolution. Call it heaven on earth.
It was done through Sarvodaya. We did it in Reno. We now have the spiritual, social, and technical infrastructure to do it worldwide.
So let’s do it!
Stay tuned to find out how I put it all together in Chapter 12, Post 1 …
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Talk about synchronicity, Richard! Worked with some friends in Indonesia on developing, building and testing a prototype eerily similar to this one, back in 2015/16. We did actually build the app, and were similarly waylaid by circumstances (though not as dramatic or painful as yours! and we didn't have anywhere near your experience with IRL communities—at least not yet ;)). Our grassroots-up focus was initially on entrepreneurs and small businesses in the region. At the same time, we also helped to create a parallel cosmo-local economy in our town, as an experiment with digital currencies, which ran modestly (and quite brilliantly) until late 2017. Methinks we were a bit premature, too; the zeitgeist seems to have just about caught up now. 😊
And yet a website exists https://onesphera.com/ BTW I wonder if the phone network (not the telegraph system that included ranches with wires) and the internet can be thought of a symbiotic network that everyone can sit in?
Of course I see some differences with the symbiosis your work is attempting to build. I can also see some challenges - there has to be a community of scale and with enough diversity to act. So for example highly specialised demands might not be met locally. It also I think can seem that there is not the chance to find opportunities for some in many communities. Many urban areas suffer from this food poverty, lack of cultural resources and poor / expensive transport links. Yet it can be even worse in a rural community. I think of areas with 50% unemployment and few opportunities which then promote out migration. Or certain populations which can find they cannot find what they seek. FOR example there are 1400 PhD holders in Finland who have been unemployed for over a year. Surely they are intelligent and well educated - yet they cannot find work. What could be done about them? Similarly the large number of people in the USA using substances to get by indicates a deep malaise within that society.